Use hosts file on your Mac to filter net traffic

Old trick. But still very useful. Won’t be long before OS will start limiting these, then we will have to all switch to linux. 🙂

Stop some software from calling home, use it to filter ads, or just to redirect or misdirect certain sites.

Just open up Terminal and type:

sudo pico /etc/hosts

then just edit or add more lines to it.

127.0.0.1 is your own machine. So “127.0.0.1 google.com” will mean mapping google.com to your own machine. Unless you have your own web server running, that would mean blocking google.com. Or point it to another IP address, so you can redirect google.com to another site. Silly trick.

Checkout the follow repos and links:

https://github.com/2ndalpha/gasmask
https://www.putorius.net/block-unwanted-advertisements-on.html
https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm